The Secret of the Night
were presented to him. Athanase had described him accurately enough, a
mannikin in fat. Under the vast bent brow one could hardly see his eyes,
behind the blue glasses that seemed always ready to fall as he inclined
too far his fat head with its timid and yet all-powerful glance. When he
spoke in his falsetto voice, his chin dropped in a fold over his collar,
and he had a steady gesture with the thumb and index finger of his right
hand to retain the glasses from sliding down his short, thick nose.
Behind him there was the fine, haughty silhouette of Prince Galitch. He
had been invited by Annouchka, for she had consented to risk this supper
only in company with three or four of her friends, officers who could
not be further compromised by this affair, as they were already
under the eye of the Okrana (Secret Police) despite their high birth.
Gounsovski had seen them come with a sinister chuckle and had lavished
upon them his marks of devotion.
He loved Annouchka. It would have sufficed to have surprised just once
the jealous glance he sent from beneath his great blue glasses when he
gazed at the singer to have understood the sentiments that actuated him
in the presence of the beautiful daughter of the Black Land.
Annouchka was seated, or, rather, she lounged, Oriental fashion, on the
sofa which ran along the wall behind the table. She paid attention to
no one. Her attitude was forbidding, even hostile. She indifferently
allowed her marvelous black hair that fell in two tresses over her
shoulder to be caressed by the perfumed hands of the beautiful Onoto,
who had heard her this evening for the first time and had thrown herself
with enthusiasm into her arms after the last number. Onoto was an artist
too, and the pique she felt at first over Annouchka’s success could not
last after the emotion aroused by the evening prayer before the hut.
“Come to supper,” Annouchka had said to her.
“With whom?” inquired the Spanish artist.
“With Gounsovski.”
“Never.”
“Do come. You will help me pay my debt and perhaps he will be useful to
you as well. He is useful to everybody.”
Decidedly Onoto did not understand this country, where the worst enemies
supped together.
Rouletabille had been monopolized at once by Prince Galitch, who took
him into a corner and said:
“What are you doing here?”
“Do I inconvenience you?” asked the boy.
The other assumed the amused smile of the great lord.
“While there is still time,” he said, “believe me, you ought to start,
to quit this country. Haven’t you had sufficient notice?”
“Yes,” replied the reporter. “And you can dispense with any further
notice from this time on.”
He turned his back.
“Why, it is the little Frenchman from the Trebassof villa,” commenced
the falsetto voice of Gounsovski as he pushed a seat towards the young
man and begged him to sit between him and Athanase Georgevitch, who was
already busy with the hors-d’oeuvres.
“How do you do, monsieur?” said the beautiful, grave voice of Annouchka.
Rouletabille saluted.
“I see that I am in a country of acquaintances,” he said, without
appearing disturbed.
He addressed a lively compliment to Annouchka, who threw him a kiss.
“Rouletabille!” cried la belle Onoto. “Why, then, he is the little
fellow who solved the mystery of the Yellow Room.”
“Himself.”
“What are you doing here?”
“He came to save the life of General Trebassof,” sniggered Gounsovski.
“He is certainly a brave little young man.”
“The police know everything,” said Rouletabille coldly. And he asked for
champagne, which he never drank.
The champagne commenced its work. While Thaddeus and the officers
told each other stories of Bakou or paid compliments to the women,
Gounsovski, who was through with raillery, leaned toward Rouletabille
and gave that young man fatherly counsel with great unction.
“You have undertaken, young man, a noble task and one all the more
difficult because General Trebassof is condemned not only by his enemies
but still more by the ignorance of Koupriane. Understand me thoroughly:
Koupriane is my friend and a man whom I esteem very highly. He is good,
brave as a warrior, but I wouldn’t give a kopeck for his police. He has
mixed in our affairs lately by creating his own secret police, but
I don’t wish to meddle with that. It amuses us. It’s the new style,
anyway; everybody wants his secret police nowadays. And yourself, young
man, what, after all, are you doing here? Reporting? No. Police work?
That is our business and your business. I wish you good luck, but I
don’t expect it. Remember that if you need any help I will give it you
willingly. I love to be of service. And I don’t wish any harm to befall
you.”
“You are very kind, monsieur,” was all Rouletabille replied, and he
called again for champagne.
Several times Gounsovski addressed remarks to Annouchka, who concerned
herself with her meal and had little answer for him.
“Do you know who applauded you the most this evening?”
“No,” said Annouchka indifferently.
“The daughter of General Trebassof.”
“Yes, that is true, on my word,” cried Ivan Petrovitch.
“Yes, yes, Natacha was there,” joined in the other friends from the
datcha des Iles.
“For me, I saw her weep,” said Rouletabille, looking at Annouchka
fixedly.
But Annouchka replied in an icy tone:
“I do not know her.”
“She is unlucky in having a father...” Prince Galitch commenced.
“Prince, no politics, or let me take my leave,” clucked Gounsovski.
“Your health, dear Annouchka.”
“Your health, Gounsovski. But you have no worry about that.”
“Why?” demanded Thaddeus Tchitchnikoff in equivocal fashion.
“Because he is too useful to the government,” cried Ivan Petrovitch.
“No,” replied Annouchka; “to the revolutionaries.”
All broke out laughing. Gounsovski recovered his slipping glasses by
his usual quick movement and sniggered softly, insinuatingly, like fat
boiling in the pot:
“So they say. And it is my strength.”
“His system is excellent,” said the prince. “As he is in with everybody,
everybody is in with the police, without knowing it.”
“They say... ah, ah... they say...” (Athanase was choking over a little
piece of toast that he had soaked in his soup) “they say that he has
driven away all the hooligans and even all the beggars of the church of
Kasan.”
Thereupon they commenced to tell stories of the hooligans,
street-thieves who since the recent political troubles had infested St.
Petersburg and whom nobody, could get rid of without paying for it.
Athanase Georgevitch said:
“There are hooligans that ought to have existed even if they never have.
One of them stopped a young girl before Varsovie station. The girl,
frightened, immediately held out her purse to him, with two roubles and
fifty kopecks in it. The hooligan took it all. ‘Goodness,’ cried she,
‘I have nothing now to take my train with.’ ‘How much is it?’ asked the
hooligan. ‘Sixty kopecks.’ ‘Sixty kopecks! Why didn’t you say so?’ And
the bandit, hanging onto the two roubles, returned the fifty-kopeck
piece to the trembling child and added a ten-kopeck piece out of his own
pocket.”
“Something quite as funny happened to me two winters ago, at Moscow,”
said la belle Onoto. “I had just stepped out of the door when I was
stopped by a hooligan. ‘Give me twenty kopecks,’ said the hooligan. I
was so frightened that I couldn’t get my purse open. ‘Quicker,’ said he.
Finally I gave him twenty kopecks. ‘Now,’ said he then, ‘kiss my hand.’
And I had to kiss it, because he held his knife in the other.”
“Oh, they are quick with their knives,” said Thaddeus. “As I was
leaving Gastinidvor once I was stopped by a hooligan who stuck a huge
carving-knife under my nose. ‘You can have it for a rouble and a half,’
he said. You can believe that I bought it without any haggling. And
it was a very good bargain. It was worth at least three roubles. Your
health, belle Onoto.”
“I always take my revolver when I go out,” said Athanase. “It is more
prudent. I say this before the police. But I would rather be arrested by
the police than stabbed by the hooligans.”
“There’s no place any more to buy revolvers,” declared Ivan Petrovitch.
“All such places are closed.”
Gounsovski settled his glasses, rubbed his fat hands and said:
“There are some still at my locksmith’s place. The proof is that to-day
in the little Kaniouche my locksmith, whose name is Smith, went into the
house of the grocer at the corner and wished to sell him a revolver. It
was a Browning. ‘An arm of the greatest reliability,’ he said to him,
‘which never misses fire and which works very easily.’ Having pronounced
these words, the locksmith tried his revolver and lodged a ball in the
grocer’s lung. The grocer is dead, but before he died he bought the
revolver. ‘You are right,’ he said to the locksmith; ‘it is a terrible
weapon.’ And then he died.”
The others laughed heartily. They thought it very funny. Decidedly this
great Gounsovski always had a funny story. Who would not like to be
his friend? Annouchka had deigned to smile. Gounsovski, in recognition,
extended his hand to her like a mendicant. The young woman touched it
with the end of her fingers, as if she were placing a twenty-kopeck
piece in the hand of a hooligan, and withdrew from it with disgust. Then
the doors opened for the Bohemians. Their swarthy troupe soon filled the
room. Every evening men and women in their native costumes came from old
Derevnia, where they lived all together in a sort of ancient patriarchal
community, with customs that had not changed for centuries; they
scattered about in the places of pleasure, in the fashionable
restaurants, where they gathered large sums, for it was a fashionable
luxury to have them sing at the end of suppers, and everyone showered
money on them in order not to be behind the others. They accompanied on
guzlas, on castanets, on tambourines, and sang the old airs, doleful and
languorous, or excitable and breathless as the flight of the earliest
nomads in the beginnings of the world.
When they had entered, those present made place for them, and
Rouletabille, who for some moments had been showing marks of fatigue and
of a giddiness natural enough in a young man who isn’t in the habit
of drinking the finest champagnes, profited by the diversion to get a
corner of the sofa not far from Prince Galitch, who occupied the place
at Annouchka’s right.
“Look, Rouletabaille is asleep,” remarked la belle Onoto.
“Poor boy!” said Annouchka.
And, turning toward Gounsovski:
“Aren’t you soon going to get him out of our way? I heard some of our
brethren the other day speaking in a way that would cause pain to those
who care about his health.”
“Oh, that,” said Gounsovski, shaking his head, “is an affair I have
nothing to do with. Apply to Koupriane. Your health, belle Annouchka.”
But the Bohemians swept some opening chords for their songs, and the
singers took everybody’s attention, everybody excepting Prince Galitch
and Annouchka, who, half turned toward one another, exchanged some
words on the edge of all this musical uproar. As for Rouletabille, he
certainly must have been sleeping soundly not to have been waked by
all that noise, melodious as it was. It is true that he
had--apparently--drunk a good deal and, as everyone knows, in Russia
drink lays out those who can’t stand it. When the Bohemians had sung
three times Gounsovski made a sign that they might go to charm other
ears, and slipped into the hands of the chief of the band a twenty-five
rouble note. But Onoto wished to give her mite, and a regular collection
commenced. Each one threw roubles into the plate held out by a little
swarthy Bohemian girl with crow-black hair, carelessly combed, falling
over her forehead, her eyes and her face, in so droll a fashion that one